How to begin programming

I just finished converting Reading Pen Pals-a web site I made 4 years ago as a class project (my first!)-into a database web site using PHP/MySQL. It felt like a huge project but went much faster than I thought it would, only a few days. I learned a few things along the way that seem like good lessons for teaching programming to children. I'm not a programmer by training, so I figured my way through the problems I encountered in this project without having much understanding of why the problems existed. So as I reflect on what helped me out, some key points that might help kids come to mind:

1. Most importantly, look for patterns. I often didn't understand how the syntax worked from the tutorials I used, but seeing similarities in different tutorials allowed me to make good guesses.
2. Make it work, then make it look nice. Actually, I already tell this to my students, whenever I get a chance. It was really helpful to set up a very small-scale version of what I wanted at each step and make sure it worked, then add features one at a time and only in the end did I make it look the way I wanted. That helped me avoid having to re-do a lot of work unnecessarily.
3. Patience. This is the hardest thing for kids to maintain. Encountering problems is frustrating and even systematically doing the second point takes lots of patience and restraint. In many cases the problems are interesting and some even teach you something about how computers and the internet work, so if you can enjoy that along the way you're benefitting in more ways than you expect. One problem I havent' yet solved about this project was getting the PHP mail function to stop escaping quotes in the email messages. This gave me a window into the nature of information transmission on the internet and how protocols are set up, though it was just a starting point for learning a lot more.
   

Technology for Really Dumb Dummies

I'd been following the story of Barbara Bush's Katrina donation being earmarked for her grand-nephew Neil Bush's junkware company, Ignite! Learning, with the vague interest I have for most of the numerous scandals of the Bush administration. Then a TPM post with a reader's description of clueless and entitled Neil's visit to his lower-east side middle school piqued my interest in what his company's deal is. It turns out their main product is called a COW (Curriculum On Wheels), a bulbous box on a rolling stand in which they've managed to stuff a "computer, projector, and speakers)" and "comes pre-loaded with all of Ignite!'s Science or Social Studies courses."

While they think this nifty little self-enclosed system is a plus ("You just plug it in and start teaching!"), it's really the worst kind of condescension toward teachers that I can imagine. How stupid would it be to purchase a computer and projector that can only be used for one purpose?!? And Neil Bush as much as admits that he doesn't trust teachers to make their own decisions with technology when he says something I can't repeat here about the COW's dummy-proof design (see the link referenced above). There are just so many things wrong with this product I can't bear to list them all...

Power Point Stifles Thought and Communication

I've been reading Edward Tufte's “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within”. Arvind's comments on 21 Apples cover most of my thoughts, but after this reading and talking I sat down to try out some of the alternate diagrammatical schemes Power Point offers besides bullets and clipart. It's worse than I could have imagined. All of the non-linear organizational charts are so bound by their extreme adherence to form as to make them completely useless for effective communication. They are airtight containers that constrict all content to their own limitations. Let's take a look at PowerPoint's chart madness, or at least a couple samples for now as I'm getting tired.

1. The Target is the most rediculous: This is to be "used to show steps toward a goal." The first thing you notice is that the steps are in the wrong order--bottom to top. There's no way to change this since the text and links are immovable. They beg to be dragged around the shape until they're positioned just right, but they won't budge. You can apply some pretty eye-catching styles to your bullseye, though.

2. The Cycle is meant to "show a process with a continuous cycle." That's fine if the cycle you want to illustrate really has no beginning or end. I tried to flip one of the arrows to show how an event might enter the system, but these arrows are stuck like a tram on a cable. The best I could do was copy and paste one and grab at those weird MS Office graphics manipulation handles until one of them flipped it over. Even then, the most the intruding arrow can do is lie on top of one that's cemented into place. The handles are flights of fancy you can use to distort the arrows into whimsical but useless shapes, like this nice donut I made.

MicroWorlds EX Robotics and Lego NXT

Don't expect MW EX Robotics to be compatible with Lego NXT any time soon. I just received this from Shawn Jesty at Logo Computer Systems:

"We'll begin development as soon as we get a new NXT brick."

I guess that resolves my question of what to be ordering this summer.

Lego NXT

The new generation of Lego robotics is due out in a few to several months, from Mindstorms 2.0. to Mindstorms NXT. Read about it at Nextbrick and this great article in Wired.

Tight robotics class

In teaching my second 10-week section of Lego robotics with Logo using MicroWorlds I've started out in a much tighter format than last trimester with this new group of 7th graders. I'm building their basic robots for them (currently a fan, not pictured; that's an old one, student-designed) rather than letting them design and build their own, which is really not the way I think it should be--the class should be about problems in the design and construction of the robot as well as the creating of their programs, and really how these two things affect each other.

Why am I doing it the "wrong" way? My class meets once a week for 45 minutes, well 42 minutes, which includes setup and clean up time. That's a rediculously small amount of time for messy experimentation. Given that my highest priority is that they get to learn as much as possible about programming, which gets messy enough as it is, I need to take some of the building problems out of the equation.

MySpace is not YourSpace

The tussle between MySpace users and Murdoch is very interesting and I'm on the edge of my seat watching it develop. Once Murdoch Inc. bought MySpace, it began meddling in typical cutthroat corporate fashion by blocking all references to competitor YouTube. This was a big miscalculation because of the sudden popularity of the Chronic (what?) cles of Narnia video that users wanted to bring into their MySpace pages. I think there's a lot at stake here, the insidious infiltration of corporate interests into peoples' expanding expectations to have resources available to express their social/creative interests--an impending collision.

Relevance to education? This is Media Literacy 101 as far as I'm concerned and my students need it badly. I'm glad users are seeing the influence of the site's owners, lest they continue to think that owners of social software have only the users' interests in mind.

Impermanence III: Empty Loading Bars

I've been oursourcing information management for a while and depend on external web sites for so much now: protopage for notes and resources, basecamp for project management, del.icio.us for over 300 bookmarks, and most recently I tagged all of my bloglines blogs in kinja. When these servers go down (recently on del.icio.us and kinja at the same time!) I'm left without the information when I need it. When all I can get is an empty loading bar I figure all we can really depend on is our brains, so busy trying to save all this information, pictures and dates and it can disappear in an instant. If del.icio.us loses its database contents we all just have to start over unless we've backed up somehow--even then it won't be easy. My students are more used to this than I am. They get a weak wireless signal and find that their essay hasn't saved to their network drive and they have to start over. And they do. Their only problem is learning temporary backup techniques, like saving to the desktop and resaving to the network when they have a stronger signal.

Impermanence II

I'm thinking of the context in which my students are growing up. I have to get around to preserving the last few years of digital images of my family, printing good photos, burning cds, dvds of captured video. It's so much work! So much easier when it was just on paper to begin with. Sometimes I think, what really needs to be documented, anyway? Then my daughter, 6, asks during a dinner table conversation, "What did you write about in your high school papers?" Lo and behold, I had them in a box in the closet, so I could actually pull out those bad papers and show her. It was worth it.

Impermanence I

This theme is the primary reason I wanted to start a blog. It's the idea that our ability to archive the events of our lives is undergoing a huge transformation and, indeed, the function of personal, family, cultural and human history as well. I'll have to flesh out this theme over several posts as it comes up in various contexts. The first is my feeling upon looking at the Internet Archive. It makes me dizzy. Why even try to preserve it all? Aren't we supposed to wait a while and let the historians decide what was important and the critics decide what's important now? Suddenly, because everyone CAN publish, everything is worth preserving and everyone expects an audience (even me!). I feel like the volume of the whole is diminishing the importance of the individual parts. The ability to publish so easily is a great thing, but I don't think we need to save it all. An eleven-year-old student recently asked me how she could "get on Google" because then she would be famous. I didn't know where to begin, but whatever I said didn't shake her notion that publishing guarantees fame.